Berntsen International Inc. President Mike Klonsinski (left) and company owners Rhonda and Bill Rushing look over a survey monument manufactured for the federal government to mark boundaries in Alaska. MICHAEL SEARS / MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

An order of survey monuments waits to be shipped. These have bronze caps on a stainless steel tube, but markers come in many forms for different applications. MICHAEL SEARS / MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

Jenni Ellestad gets out aluminum caps for survey monuments. Ellestad will use her stamping press to insert plastic insulators that will help connect them and prevent corrosion. MICHAEL SEARS / MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL

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Berntsen International Inc. President Mike Klonsinski (left) and company owners Rhonda and Bill Rushing look over a survey monument manufactured for the federal government to mark boundaries in Alaska.(Photo: MICHAEL SEARS / MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL)Buy Photo

MADISON- Not long ago, Rhonda Rushing got off a cruise ship at Skagway, the one-time Klondike boom town in the Alaska panhandle.

It’s a picturesque spot — evergreen-covered cliffs framing a long and narrow fjord, sawtooth peaks rising in the middle distance and streets peppered with historic buildings dating to the mad rush for gold in the 1890s.

While her fellow passengers focused their cameras on the spectacular scenery, Rushing’s eyes were drawn to an unremarkable patch of sidewalk. There, between a set of railroad tracks and a utility pole, was a small metal disc embedded in the pavement — and, for Rushing, the prize photo of the trip.

When your company is the nation’s dominant maker of the survey monuments that mark federal lands and other boundaries, and you happen to spot one of those markers on the streets of Skagway, it’s a discovery worth recording.

“I’m taking pictures at the concrete down here, you know, when most people are taking mountain pictures,” the soft-spoken Rushing said as she recalled the story.

Given enough luck and time, she theoretically could duplicate the find across vast stretches of the U.S. and in scores of other countries.

Millions of survey markers — usually discs of bronze or aluminum a few inches across — have been produced by Rushing’s firm, Berntsen International Inc. in Madison.

“It’s well-recognized that Berntsen is, if you like to use the phrase, the big dog,” said Dave Doyle, the federal government’s former chief geodetic surveyor and a man so immersed in spatial reference systems that he got married at the International Latitude Observatory in Gaithersburg, Maryland. “They really are the leaders in survey marks.”

“If you were to talk with almost any surveyor around the country, you would find nothing but the highest respect for Berntsen,” Doyle said.

The object of this regard has just 20 employees and operates out of a modest building across from a soybean field on the northeast side of Madison.

Inside, a pair of orbital forging presses exert what amounts to 2,000 tons of pressure on unheated cylinders of metal, squishing them like cookie dough into densely grained discs ready to be stamped with the appropriate mark. These things have been placed in the ground as far afield as Myanmar and Saudi Arabia. The U.S. military has used them in Iraq and Afghanistan.

At the moment, many of them are going to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and its cadastral survey — the program that sets the formal boundaries for more than 700 million acres of federal and tribal land.

Berntsen recently won a $5 million contract to supply BLM. The initial order is for 1,000 monuments — 3-foot-tall stainless steel tubes capped by bronze discs — to mark survey boundaries in Alaska.

Building a better survey monument

This is sort of the final frontier of an effort that has helped define the U.S. since 1785, when the federal government directed that land west of the Appalachian Mountains be surveyed not with the crazy-quilt metes-and-bounds system of the original colonies but into standard square-mile sections and 36-square-mile townships. The result is visible from the air — a rectangular grid of land parcels that inevitably reminds Rushing, when she flies, of her firm’s work.

The business was started in 1972 by Peter Berntsen, owner of a Madison foundry that remains in business, and Rushing’s father, Phillip Peterson, who until then had been selling heavy equipment.

“Peter had the foundry and manufacturing background and my dad had a super sales background and so they were a good team,” Rushing said.

They devised and marketed a new type of survey monument — an aluminum device much lighter than the cast-iron versions of the past, and fitted with below-ground magnets so the marker could be easily located if the cap got sheared off by, say, a snow plow.

The NGS is a federal government agency that traces its roots to 1807 when it was established by President Thomas Jefferson.

“I don’t think I’ve ever worked with any other companies besides Berntsen,” said Malcolm Archer-Shee, who does training and programming for the agency.

Unlike ordinary land surveys, geodetic surveying takes into account elevation and the curvature of the earth and is extraordinarily precise, pinpointing latitude and longitude to within less than a centimeter, Archer-Shee said.

As such, it can be put to such uses as monitoring the movement of tectonic plates or determining the exact elevation of airport runways, he said.

Doyle said the National Geodetic Survey set several Berntsen markers in the basement of the U.S. Capitol about 20 years ago as part of an effort to find the building’s original cornerstone, which had been covered by later construction. They didn’t find the stone, but the Berntsen discs — small ones about an inch across — remain, he said.

“We’ve (also) used them in places like the Washington Monument, the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials,” Doyle said.

Growing in an age of satellite-based GPS

Last year, Rushing stepped away from overseeing Berntsen’s day-to-day operations, turning those duties over to Mike Klonsinski, former executive director of the Wisconsin Manufacturing Extension Partnership and a former executive with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.

Klonsinski is Berntsen’s president. Rushing holds the title of CEO, and she and her husband, Bill, a retired Berntsen executive, still own the firm and remain involved.

Part of that involvement has been to guide the company in new directions amid the increased use of satellite-based GPS for determining location.

In 2016, Berntsen got a patent on a systemdesigned to improve mapping and locating of underground utilities such as gas and water lines. The system, which Berntsen calls InfraMarker, uses RFID, magnetic locating, smartphone technology and cloud-based data storage to help workers avoid accidental utility hits.

“We have to realize the world is changing and its moving,” Rhonda Rushing said. “We want to move with it so that we’re relevant and what we do is relevant.”

That could mean equipping boundary markers with sensors that can gather and communicate information, Klonsinski said. Conventional markers will continue to be needed, but the market for them won’t be high-growth, he said.

Berntsen, he said, is now experimenting with plastics and composites that can serve as boundary markers but also be embedded with sensors.

“We want to change with the times,” Rushing said. “Not get left behind.”